Rohini Nilekani Quotes

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn't. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.

There are hundreds, even thousands of remarkable pilot or experimental projects in all fields - in agriculture, health, education. But where do these pilots take us? Do they lead to change on a broader scale? If not, how can we ensure that they have broader impact?

Do one thing well, and then build from there.

In a market where funding is hard to come by, if you're scaled already, then you are in a brilliant position because nobody is going to catch up with you.

We need a collective moment where we commit ourselves to long-term solutions.

Plenty of entrepreneurs can start a company. What is more rare is to evolve it and to scale with it over time.

The future of innovation has to include not only the technology, but economic viability.

Users and entrepreneurs building new business models off the blockchain means that there are competing interests on how best to scale the network. Linux, also an open source software project, had similar growing pains.

Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.

A lot of scaling up a company is not very sexy or strategic.

Tackling the extreme gap between the rich and the poor and tackling climate change is part of the same struggle.

You have to grow faster than the pace of your company.

Do not figure out big plans at first, but, begin slowly, feel your ground and proceed up and up.

All of us can make changes, but the changes that are most needed are not light bulbs and windows but laws and policies and treaties. So, yes, we are in a phase of this (climate protection) struggle where civic and political action is at the top of the list.

The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

Pushing yourself to be the best is unsustainable. Simply push yourself to be better than the day before.

Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.

What I have been trying to remind people of for the past 40 years is that you can’t operate an entire conventional system, whether it’s economics, business or the way we live and surround ourselves, what we eat, without recognizing that there are severe negative externalities that are not being accounted for.

The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives.

One of the things we have learned in the first year is that if you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

The oldest habit in the world for resisting change is to complain that unless the remedy to the disease should be universally applied it should not be applied at all. But you must start somewhere.